Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  “Threes are bad shit,” the second demon declared. “I say we abort.”

  “Stay on it!” Jones ordered. “Focus on the Tem, forget the rest . . .”

  “Cut it!” Malachi heard himself shrieking over the scream of the barge engines, rising to accompany the crystal’s drain of power. He knew about the Fates. Too much. Plenty. If these ships somehow partook of their mystery then he wanted nothing to do with them. He was suddenly and coldly certain they would not survive the three ships and at the same moment in his mind he heard a little, sweet voice sing: I saw three ships come sailing in . . .

  “They’re connecting!” he screamed, realising that a link between the ghosts and his own mind was building, sudden and fierce. Arcs of lightning jagged towards him from the crystal.

  “Fuck!” screamed Jones with anger and defeat. She brought her hand down on the control panel like a fighter slamming an opponent to unconscious defeat. A cage of iron sprang up around the crystal and a clockwork mechanism triggered a lead jacket to clamp shut around that. The beam vanished. The engines gave up with a sigh, taking the music with them as they went into emergency down mode. All the instruments went dead. The Matilda stilled.

  There was quiet, except for the lonely tolling of the warning bells.

  “You didn’t say anything about the Fates,” Malachi said plaintively into the furious, accusatory seconds that followed. “You didn’t say anything about the Fleet.”

  Zal pushed his pile of pebbles across to the silent earth elemental. “You win again! I think you’re hiding cards up your sleeves.” He had run out of pebble currency. The elemental had a medium-sized pile of stones set in front of it, enough to buy the whole casino, Zal reflected, as he collected the tiny scraps of a ripped up till receipt he had found in his pocket and attempted to shuffle them. A capricious breeze that had been around a few times already got hold of a piece and blew it away, chasing it across the long shadows of the rocky outcrops. The sun was going down. Zal peered at the rest of the papers. They were mostly covered in dirty fingermarks so he couldn’t read the little magical marks he had placed in the paper hours ago.

  “There goes the three of hearts,” he said. “And that means I don’t want to hear any more straight flush calls from you,” he wagged his finger at the elemental. “Now I’m willing to bet . . .” But he couldn’t think of anything it might want. More stones lay a few feet away but he felt too sick to go get them. He wondered if it had been such a good idea to wait for sundown to get moving. He’d thought that without the light powering up the worst of the crystal interference with the aether weather he’d be more able to get around but there seemed to be no discernible difference in the forces around him. “I’m willing to bet that if I stay here with you, my dear friend, I will never get out of this place alive. Possibly even dead.” He knew by the dull force of resignation he felt that this was surely the truth. He let go of the rest of his cards and the little zephyr came by and chased them all about in a tiny storm of paper flakes. A few of them stuck to Mr. Potato Head and slowly absorbed some of his moisture, turning brown and grey. The tiny sigils Zal had forced on them gleamed like the dials on an old clock, reminding him even more that though he couldn’t feel it he was being zapped by fearsome frequencies.

  He accessed the soft colouration of his flare and felt the fire energies renew themselves, burning through him with something not entirely unlike pain. They were considerably weaker than they had been. He had not seen any fire beings here at all, in spite of his closeness to several vents in the raw ground where steams and smokes issued at irregular intervals, promising some kind of underground sources. Weak air zephyrs continued to amuse themselves with his cards, and soon scattered them far and wide. None of them burst into flame. They simply blew away. He was going to have to get out on his own.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said to Mr. Potato Head with solemn sorrow. “But I must take my leave. It’s been fun.”

  The elemental slowly assimilated the five of diamonds with a thoughtful slide of gloop down one side of its body. It rejected the paper a moment later, having stripped it of its remaining magic.

  “I knew you were cheating,” Zal said wearily and set his teeth together as he pushed himself up to sitting. His andalune felt sickly and weak, pushed through by the fire energy of his demon flare in ways it was never attuned to. His dual nature was pulling itself apart. He groaned and threw up on the sand. Mostly it was just dry retching. He spat stomach acid and grimaced against the taste. It was highly mineralised. He was starting to evaporate.

  He pushed the thought away and forced himself to his feet. The air zephyrs snatched at his hair. He held it aside and stared across the shimmering flats. No direction suggested itself but to one part he thought he could see a change in the shapes of the stones and the suggestion of rocky outcrops that might provide shelter, if they did not harbour lodes of deadly elemental deposits, and so without further contemplation he set one foot before the other.

  He had gone about forty agonised paces, not allowing a pause even for dizziness or stumbling, when he heard a soft sound behind him. He turned cautiously, too weak to defend himself against any great threat, and saw a ball of mud roll to a stop beside his feet. It ejected some sand in a kind of shake and then resolved itself into the familiar head-to-side lumpiness of the earth elemental. There were two kind of holes that were eyes, but no other feature of note, just a head, a body, a stare.

  “Wrong person, pal,” Zal said. “I’m a fire guy. We had this out before when you stiffed me out of all those rocks.” He returned to his path and began plodding. The sun was down now and the temperature was soft and dewy. Water was gathering in droplets in the air. It was the complementary energy to his natural fire and he felt it as a dampener, literally and aetherically, neutralising what remained of his excessive energies. He got weaker, but he started to feel better and for a time he was able to walk without too much difficulty, feeling nothing worse than a hundred self-inflicted hangovers.

  As he did so he heard the occasional sound of sand shifting or small stones being rolled close behind him. As the land darkened and the sky grew pink at the edges, then lavender, then blue, he kept on without pausing. Then at some point he stubbed his toes hard on something extremely solid and stopped without thinking, grunting in pain.

  It was dark. He realised, with a great surprise, that there was no moon in the sky, only the blaze of stars which cast a very weak light . . . mostly because there were not many of them. He looked for the splash that would mark the position of the galactic main body, but for the first time in his life, he could not find it. He heard the wet glop noise of serious mud ejecting a stone close by. “Where the bejesus is this?” he said aloud, forgetting all his aches and pains, his sickness, in the surprise. He thought that surely some spatial displacement was possible between the realms, though theories of transparency and mutable dimensions had floated around the elven realms all his life . . . but he had never seen proof that at least one of these places drifted beneath different skies.

  Elf eyes were good in low light, but not this low. Zal bent to rub his foot and let his andalune body spill out slowly into the surrounding air and ground, replacing his primary physical senses with everything that it could tell him. He felt the first numbshock that always greeted the extension of his aetheric body into worlds that did not contain any viable akashic sentience for contact. It blurred and then it shifted. There were no conscious things there with him—not exactly . . . but there were things with him all right.

  Zal straightened up, suddenly more awake than he had been. Elementals of the sort that crossed the borders and flitted to business in other realms were always reasonably well-formed individuals, and usually at least as conscious as most animals. These things were an order of magnitude dumber than that, but they were aware of something—others and themselves and, of course, him. In fact the more he stood there and expanded his sensitivity the more things and varieties of things he could detect. They
moved in fields, as if fields were a kind of cattle, shifting in herds of greater magnitude, or shoals of fish . . . big shoals of very big widely distributed fish . . . no, his metaphors were packing up under the strain. Things drifted, skeins and nets and the bodies within them, playing with the beginnings of form. Some coalesced into microfragments of physical elements: carbon, vanadium, cobalt, sodium . . . Some became the aetheric elements of fire, air, metal, water, and earth . . . But some had stranger properties, things he could only call abstract. They were no more than energy in formation, a cluster of pulses . . . he realised with a gasp of unadulterated delight—they were numbers.

  “Mr. Head!” he said into the starlit night. “I declare, there are more of you than I thought.” He assumed the earth elemental was still following him. Maybe it thought he might yield some suitable components for it . . . For a minute or so the discovery and this possibility amused him, until he remembered why he was there and where he should have been instead. “But we must go on, Mr. Head,” he said wearily, vaguely aware that not only was he witnessing numbers in existence, he was also getting the notion that yet more oddities were out there . . . things like . . . the elements of forms—triangle, circle, square—and the elements of propositions too, the building blocks of communication.

  “Helluva time for a big discovery, Mr. Head,” Zal said, feeling his way around the rocks and moving on in the direction he seemed to remember was right. “Take a note of it if you would and keep up. We must have a record of what the expedition discovers.” The notion of being a great leader and expeditionary scientist and visionary was very pleasing. It kept him going for hours of moderately uncomfortable staggering and occasional dry heaves, all the way until the moment when he trod on the bone and snapped it under his boot.

  The next stride crunched a lot more.

  Zal stopped walking and sat down to wait for dawn. It wasn’t going to be great, but he’d found something that hadn’t decomposed entirely. So it wasn’t that old. And it used to be something that was not an elemental and that meant it had come from outside and that meant . . . he daren’t think about a way out, or about rescue parties setting out to look for their missing ones or about Jolene detecting his absence and hiring Lila to come save him . . .

  He felt the presence of the earth elemental approach him. He felt a shower of loose particles shower his boot and felt peculiarly comforted. The ground seemed friendlier here, or he was much sicker than he liked to think. The aetheric distortion was minimal, like a distant toothache instead of a hammering migraine and the fields of swirling proto-elementals were less organised, as though this was a younger zone where nothing had really got going yet. The energy was almost as indistinct as wild aether, but—there was no wild aether here. None at all. It was all formed or in the process of being formed. He composed himself into the meditation posture of his youth and winced as his knees protested but this way he could sleep sitting up. He didn’t want to lie down here, not knowing what he had been walking in when it felt so biological. “Take a note, Mr. Head,” he said with a weary sigh. “The lack of free aether in this realm means that any transits from here including portals must all draw power from beyond its borders.”

  His spirits sank as he said it. He hadn’t realised that he had been clinging to a fantasy of finding a trail of wild magic and using it to create a circle of either transit or protection. But his andalune, even damaged by radiation, was sure on that point. There was nothing wild here. He heard and felt the vibration of a small pebble being ejected from a lump of mud a few inches from the ground and coming to rest on something hard, but light and friable. With his fingers he felt out the shapes of what they were sitting on. It felt like light wood that had been carved into smooth shapes . . . he was holding a scapula. It was as big as his own. It was very much like his own. He put it down carefully and closed his eyes to wait for moonrise or dawn, whichever came first. To stop himself obsessing about scapulas and their previous owners and the possible fates of said previous owners he started to hum a little song and then, effortlessly, this became writing a song and that absorbed him entirely so that for a short time he forgot all about his troubles.

  Lila reached the Ahriman mansion at dusk. She had taken a diversion via the communal bathhouses at Magisteria, a district of the Musicians, and used their escalating chain of increasingly hot and caustic waters to scrub every last bit of necromancer out of her hair and clothing. Her insystem had given her a corrosion warning and a lot of fine print about some kind of warranty violation and at that point she had given up. The imp was no more than a passing pain in her earlobe. Tath brooded, an emerald weight in her heart. Only her jet boots kept her floating high and safe above the evening masses of demon life, swelling the streets and the city air with their homeward-bound legions.

  She could still smell the carrion stink of Madame’s companions. Or the wind was blowing from the charnel houses of the south shore where the butcheries lay open to the seaward air; meat drying, meat fresh bloodied, meat part buried and festering until it was ripe enough to sell. There was also hanging meat, flyblown meat, maggotted meat cultivating special kinds of fly and wasp larvae which could be served in the meat or on their own, live or dry roasted. They had done everything with meat that could be done. Of course they had. Cookery was an art and within it all kinds of other work was an art—cake icing, for instance, or extracting the important glands from bor wasps. Lila stopped dead in her tracks, momentarily paralysed by the enormous, lavish detail of demon cuisine, provided by her AI memory as it cued up on the charnel district. Cooking Precepture. And then, her olfactory module objected and said that the world didn’t just smell this way because Mama Azuga was cooking up blood sausage and vile ribs again. Some of the smell was coming from the house.

  Lila slowed down, waking up with cautionary alertness. She zoomed the house on high res and saw the guards and servants were mostly stationed outside, or at doors and windows. Tath unwound as he sensed her dread and stretched out a little into her torso, connecting his spectral self with her enchanted alloys, tuning to her with a subtlety she belatedly realised he’d just about perfected. She hardly felt it.

  Two demons in the brown sombre flares of officers of the government were descending to the mansion roof from the ladder of a small dirigible bearing the insignia of the Department of Official Justice. A figure emerged to meet them—Sorcha, her crimson and black body almost entirely hidden in the white robes of mourning, recognisable only by her emergent tail and its scorpion tip. They all went inside and the servants began securing the dirigible to the roof anchors.

  Lila, still fuelled on righteous outrage at Madame, landed with care and began to march inward to discover what was going on. As she proceeded the servants all glanced at her and then busied themselves more fully with their tasks. They noticed her and then they turned away . . .

  Are they—cringing? Lila asked Tath silently in her thoughts, letting them channel to him however they did.

  I believe that is not entirely accurate, the elf said. I think that what you are seeing is a shun. Whatever has occurred to the family within the House, they clearly blame you.

  Her AI confirmed it. Those who brought disaster on their families were routinely ignored by lower orders and . . .

  I believe you should exercise extreme caution in meeting any members of the family, Tath said, cutting through the detail. Whatever their personal feelings for you they may be honour-bound to exact vengeance.

  But I’m not one of the family . . . Lila said. She did slow down however, and allowed her systems to prime Battle Standard, the unique AI that would enhance and supersede her human limitations. She thought the best thing would be to find Sorcha, privately, and took some quiet passages and stairs towards her room in the hope that she could reach it without meeting anyone. She was in luck. The servants and household were distracted elsewhere and she navigated the maze of ways alone.

  Sorcha’s apartment was open and airy—it had been recently cleaned and the
smell of blood came from far away, closer to the heart of the house. Lila’s neighbouring room was open too—the door ajar. Foreboding closed on her like the touch of a cold hand. She didn’t let herself pause but went forward, pushing the door fully open with her fingertips and letting her AI and full senses scan for danger. There was none. There was nothing. She stepped through and there her momentum stalled.

  There was nothing but an enormous mess. Everything in the room appeared to have been systematically destroyed, and in the middle of it, on the floor, lay the tangled remains of Teazle’s silver net. A closer glance at the door revealed the stain of shadows around the lock and handle. There was also a scattering of dust on the floor . . . Lila bent and touched it with a fingertip. She put the fingertip into an opened slot on her opposite forearm where a microanalyser waited. Steel dust. The lock had been fragmented.

  Sub- or hypersonics, Tath said. Nocturnals are good with sound. They use it as a weapon.

  Is that how she got out of the net? Lila went forward to examine it, careful not to disturb anything, though it was difficult. Shredded bedding and the dust of other ruined items lay everywhere.

  She lifted a part of the net carefully. It weighed almost nothing.

  Looks torn, Tath said uncertainly.

  No, Lila corrected him, letting her eyes bring the ends of each fibre of the spider silk into absolute focus. Some strands were worn and frayed, warped with recoil shock, but most of them bore a clean edge. They were cut.

  Maybe she had a concealed blade?

  Lila straightened up, frowning. She was sure not. Someone else did this . . .

  Several pairs of footsteps sounded on the tiled floor outside and with them came the murmur of voices. Lila turned and saw Sorcha and one of the officers standing in the doorway. They were both surprised to see her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As if the drinking could get any heavier, just when Malachi thought they must have run out of beer, the demons produced a fourth keg. The Mode-X music had been replaced by Vivaldi’s genius at maximum volume. Malachi felt them all soothed by alcohol and music. They were nearly ready to talk to him.